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02-09-2010, 07:32 PM
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#51 | |
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the real timid left in 08
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this entire paragraph is an embarrassing example of pseudo philosophy. here's some examples of hyperreality: "A magazine photo of a model that has been touched up with a computer." "A well manicured garden" so hyperreality is really just a fancy way of saying "illusion". definition of hypereality:[quote]hypothetical inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures. [quote] is it just me or does this whole notion sound like a huge joke at the expense of those who buy into it? |
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02-09-2010, 07:38 PM
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#52 |
Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: A Few Acres of Snow
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You almost had me. I swear to God, I was about to write a page long reply, then I remembered it's timid we're talking about here.
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02-09-2010, 07:39 PM
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#53 |
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the real timid left in 08
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anyone who uses the phrase "fiction of the real" cannot be trusted to make an intelligent argument.
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02-09-2010, 07:41 PM
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#54 |
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There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our world, Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent, leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality whatsoever.1 That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of signs of the real for the real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to other signs. They are to some extent distinguishable, in the way the phonemes of language are, by a combinatory of minute binary distinctions.3 But postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.4 Faced with this homogeneous surface of syntagmatic slippage, we are left speechless. We can only gape in fascination.5 For the secret of the process is beyond our grasp. Meaning has imploded. There is no longer any external model, but there is an immanent one. To the syntagmatic surface of slippage there corresponds an invisible paradigmatic dimension that creates those minimally differentiated signs only in order for them to blur together in a pleasureless orgy of exchange and circulation. Hidden in the images is a kind of genetic code responsible for their generation.6 Meaning is out of reach and out of sight, but not be cause it has receded into the distance. It is because the code has been miniaturized. Objects are images, images are signs, signs are information, and information fits on a chip. Everything reduces to a molecular binarism. The generalized digitality of the computerized society.7
And so we gape. We cannot be said to be passive exactly, because all polarity, including the active/passive dichotomy, has disappeared. We have no earth to center us, but we ourselves function as a ground--in the electrical sense.8 We do not act, but neither do we merely receive. We absorb through our open eyes and mouths. We neutralize the play of energized images in the mass entropy of the silent majority. It makes for a fun read. But do we really have no other choice than being a naive realist or being a sponge? Deleuze and Guattari open a third way. Although it is never developed at length in any one place, a theory of simulation can be extracted from their work that can give us a start in analyzing our cultural condition under late capitalism without landing us back with the dinosaurs or launching us into hypercynicism. A common definition of the simulacrum is a copy of a copy whose relation to the model has become so attenuated that it can no longer properly be said to be a copy. It stands on its own as a copy without a model. Fredric Jameson cites the example of photorealism. The painting is a copy not of reality, but of a photograph, which is already a copy of the original.9 Deleuze, in his article "Plato and the Simulacrum," takes a similar definition as his starting point, but emphasizes its inadequacy. For beyond a certain point, the distinction is no longer one of degree. The simulacrum is less a copy twice removed than a phenomenon of a different nature altogether: it undermines the very distinction between copy and model.10 The terms copy and model bind us to the world of representation and objective (re)production. A copy, no matter how many times removed, authentic or fake, is defined by the presence or absence of internal, essential relations of resemblance to a model. The simulacrum, on the other hand, bears only an external and deceptive resemblance to a putative model. The process of its production, its inner dynamism, is entirely different from that of its supposed model; its resemblance to it is merely a surface effect, an illusion.11 The production and function of a photograph has no relation to that of the object photographed; and the photorealist painting in turn envelops an essential difference. It is that masked difference, not the manifest resemblance, that produces the effect of uncanniness so often associated with the simulacrum. A copy is made in order to stand in for its model. A simulacrum has a different agenda, it enters different circuits. Pop Art is the example Deleuze uses for simulacra that have successfully broken out of the copy mold:12 the multiplied, stylized images take on a life of their own. The thrust of the process is not to become an equivalent of the "model" but to turn against it and its world in order to open a new space for the simulacrum's own mad proliferation. The simulacrum affirms its own difference. It is not an implosion, but a differentiation; it is an index not of absolute proximity, but of galactic distances. The resemblance of the simulacrum is a means, not an end. A thing, write Deleuze and Guattari, "in order to become apparent, is forced to simulate structural states and to slip into states of forces that serve it as masks. . . . underneath the mask and by means of it, it already invests the terminal forms and the specific higher states whose integrity it will subsequently establish."13 Resemblance is a beginning masking the advent of whole new vital dimension. This even applies to mimickry in nature. An insect that mimics a leaf does so not to meld with the vegetable state of its surrounding milieu, but to reenter the higher realm of predatory animal warfare on a new footing. Mimickry, according to Lacan, is camouflage.14 It constitutes a war zone. There is a power inherent in the false: the positive power of ruse, the power to gain a strategic advantage by masking one's life force. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner shows that the ultimate enemy in this war of ruse is the so-called "model" itself. The off-world replicants return to earth not to blend in with the indigenous population, but to find the secret of their built-in obsolescence so they can escape their bondage and live full lives, and on their own terms. Imitation is an indication of a life force propelling the falsifier toward the unbridled expression of its uniqueness. The dominant replicant makes a state ment to the man who made his eyes that can be taken as a general formula for simulation: if only you could see what I have seen with your eyes. If they find out how to undo their pre-programed deaths, the replicants will not remain on earth as imitation humans. They will either take over or flee back to their own vital dimension of interplanetary space to see things no human being ever has or will. Their imitation is only a way-station en route to an unmasking and the assumption of difference. As Eric Alliez and Michel Feher observe, the best weapon against the simulacrum is not to unmask it as a false copy, but to force it to be a true copy, thereby resubmitting it to representation and the mastery of the model: the corporation that built the rebellious replicants introduces a new version complete with second-hand human memories.15 I said earlier that the simulacrum cannot adequately be discussed in terms of copy and model, and now I find myself not only talking about a model again, but claiming that it is in a life and death struggle with the simulacrum. The reality of the model is a question that needs to be dealt with. Baudrillard sidesteps the question of whether simulation replaces a real that did indeed exist, or if simulation is all there has ever been.16 Deleuze and Guattari say yes to both. The alternative is a false one because simulation is a process that produces the real, or, more precisely, more real (a more-than-real) on the basis of the real. "It carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced."17 Every simulation takes as its point of departure a regularized world comprising apparently stable identities or territories. But these "real" entities are in fact undercover simulacra that have consented to feign being copies. A silent film by Louis Feuillade illustrates the process. Vendémiaire takes place in the final days of World War I. The plot is simple: members of a well-to-family from the north of France who cannot fight in the war flee to unoccupied territory in the south to contribute their efforts to the wine harvest. There they meet one of the daughters' husband-to-be and a sinister pair of German prisoners of war who have obtained identity papers by killing two Belgians and try to pass themselves off as Allies until they can get enough money to flee to Spain. The Germans' plan is to steal from the vineyard owners and pin the theft on a gypsie woman who is also working on the harvest. The plan fails when one of the Germans, about to be found out, jumps into an empty grape storage tank. He is killed by poisonous gases produced by grapes fermenting in the next tank. His corpse is found still clutching the loot, and the gypsie woman is saved. His lonely comrade later betrays himself by getting drunk and speaking in German. The film is bracketted by grapes. The grape harvest supplies the initial motivation that sets up the situation of the plot, and the grapes themselves rather than any human hero resolve the dilemma. The film is not only bracketted by grapes, it swims in wine as its very element. Every crucial moment is expressed in terms of wine: love is expressed by the scintillating image of the faraway wife dancing in the husband's wine cup; the German menace in its highest expression is one of the escapees stomping on the grape vine; heroism is exemplified by an altruistic trooper who braves death to bring wine back to the trenches to give his comrades a taste of the homeland that will revive their will to victory; when victory does come, it is toasted to with wine, and the movie ends with a sentimental tableau of the vines and a final intertitle saying that from these vineyards a new nation will be reborn. "Simulation," Deleuze and Guattari write, "does not replace reality . . . but rather it appropriates reality in the operation of despotic overcoding, it produces reality on the new full body that replaces the earth. It expresses the appropriation and production of the real by a quasi-cause."18 The undivided, abstract flow of wine is the glorified body of the nation. It arrogates to itself the power of love, victory and rebirth. It presents itself as first and final cause. But the war was obviously not won with wine. Its causality is an illusion. But it is an effective illusion because it is reinjected into reality and sets to work: it expresses love, and thereby motivates the man to be a good husband and give sons to the nation rising; it expresses patriotism, and thereby spurs the soldiers to victory. That is why it is called a quasi-cause. It abstracts from bodies and things a transcendental plane of ideal identities: a glorious wife, a glorious family, a glorious nation. ("It carries the real beyond its principle...") Then it folds that ideal dimension back down onto bodies and things in order to force them to conform to the distribution of identities it lays out for them. ("...to the point where it is effectively produced.") It creates the entire network of resemblance and representation. Both copy and model are the products of the same fabulatory process, the final goal of which is the recreation of the earth, the creation of a new territory. The power of the quasi-cause is essentially distributive. It separates the good bodies from the bad, in other words the bodies that agree to resemble the glorious illusion it presents them as a model from those that do not; and it polices for renegade copies operating with a different agenda. The quasi-cause enables the French patriots to unmask the conniving Germans,19 and it shows up the gypsie for the true, hard-working Frenchwoman that she is despite her apparent otherness. This account overcomes the polarity between the model and the copy by treating them both as second-order productions, as working parts in the same machine; but it seems to leave intact the dichotomy between the real and the imaginary--until it is realized that the bodies and things that are taken up by this fabulatory process are themselves the result of prior simulation-based distributions operating on other levels with different quasi-causes. Simulation upon simulation. Reality is nothing but a well-tempered harmony of simulation. The world is a complex circuit of interconnected simulations, in which Feuillade's own film takes its place. It was made in 1919, just after the war. Every war, especially one of those dimensions, has a powerful deterritorializing effect: the mobilization of troops and supplies, refugees from other countries, refugees to other countries, families broken, entire regions levelled... The film itself is a simulation meant to insert itelf into that disjointed situation to help induce a unifying reterritorialization, to contribute to the rebirth of the nation. Vendémiare is the first month of the Republican calendar. So what we are left with is a distinction not primarily between the model and the copy, or the real and the imaginary, but between two modes of simulation. One, exemplified in Feuillade's film, is normative, regularizing, and reproductive. It selects only certain properties of the entities it takes up: hard work, loyalty, good parenting, etc. It creates a network of surface resemblances. They are surface resemblances because at bottom they not resemblances at all but standardized actions: what those entities do when called upon (the gypsie in this respect is as French as the French). What bodies do depends on where they land in a abstract grid of miraculated identities that are in practice only a bundle of normalized and basically reproductive functions. It is not a question of Platonic copies, but of human replicants. Every society creates a quasi-causal system of this kind. In capitalist society the ultimate quasi-cause is capital itself,20 which is described by Marx as a miraculating substance that arrogates all things to itself and presents itself as first and final cause. This mode of simulation goes by the name of "reality." The other mode of simulation is the one that turns against the entire system of resemblance and replication. It is also distributive, but the distribution it effects is not limitative. Rather than selecting only certain properties, it selects them all, it multiplies potentials: not to be human, but to be human plus. This kind of simulation is called "art." Art also recreates a territory, but a territory that is not really territorial. It is less like the earth with its gravitational grid than an interplanetary space, a deterritorialized territory providing a possibility of movement in all directions. Artists are replicants who have found the secret of their obsolescence. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari invent a vocabulary enabling them to discuss both modes of simulation without lapsing into the terminology of representation. The key concept is double becoming. There are always at least two terms swept up in a fabulous process that transforms them both.21 David Cronenberg's film, The Fly, presents an instance of this, although a failed one. A scientist named Brundle accidentally splices him self with a fly as he is experimenting with a machine that can dematerialize objects and transport them instantly to any chosen location, in defiance of gravity and Newtonian physics generally. When the accident occurs, Brundle does not so much become fly, nor the fly human. Rather, certain properties or potentials of both combine in a new and monstrous amalgation: a Brundle-Fly that can walk on walls and think and speak well enough to describe itself as the world's first "insect politician." It tries to purify itself of the fly in it by repeating the process backwards, but only succeeds in combining with the machinery itself. In limitative or negative becoming as portrayed in Vendémiare, one of the terms is an abstract identity and the body in question must curtail its potentials in order to fit into the grid, or at least appear to. In nonlimitative or positive becoming, as in The Fly, both terms are on the same level: rather than looking perpendicularly up or down, one moves sideways toward a another position on the grid for which one was not destined, toward an animal, a machine, a person of a different sex or age or race, an insect, a plant. The fabulatory process, though as abstract as subatomic physics, is immanent to the world of the things it affects, and is as real as a quark.22 The transporting machine is on the same plane as the terms it combines. Its operating principle dips into that world's quantum level, into its pool of virtuality, to create an as yet unseen amalgamation of potentials. It produces a new body or territory from which there is no turning back. The only choice is to keep on becoming in an endless relay from one term to the next until the process either makes a breakthrough or exhausts its potential, spends its fuel, and the fabulous animal dies. Likening this to interplanatary space can be misleading: there is nothing farther from free-floating weightlessness than this. There is no such thing as total indetermination. Every body has its own propulsion, its own life force, its own set of potentials defining how far it can go. And it moves in a world filled with the obstacles thrown down by sedimentations of preexisting simulations of the "real" persuasion. There is no generalized indetermination, but there are localized points of undecidability where man meets fly. The goal is to reach into one's world's quantum level at such a point and, through the strategic mimickry of double becoming, combine as many potentials as possible. Deleuze and Guattari, of course, are not suggesting that people can or should "objectively" become insects. It is a question of extracting and combining potentials, which they define as abstract relations of movement and rest, abilities to affect and be affected: abstract yet real. The idea is to build our own transporting machine and use it to get a relay going and to keep it going, creating ever greater and more powerful amalgamations and spreading them like a contagion until they infect every identity across the land and the point is reached where a now all-invasive positive simulation can turn back against the grid of resemblance and replication and overturn it for a new earth. Deleuze and Guattari insist on the collective nature of this process of becoming, even when it is seemingly embodied in a solitary artist. Revolutionary or "minor"23 artists marshal all of the powers of the false their community has to offer. They create a working simulation that may then reinject itself into society like Feuillade's wine assemblage, but to very different, though perhaps equally intoxicating, effect. Returning to The Fly, the former scientist's only hope for a breakthrough is to convince his former girlfriend to have a child by him and the fly. His hope, and her fear, is that he will infect the human race with Brundle-Flies, and a new race with superhuman strength will rise up to replace the old. The overman as superfly.24 Reproduction, and the forging of a new ethnic identity, are aspects of this process of simulation, but they are not the goal. The goal is life, a world in which the New Brundle can live without hiding and repressing his powers. That possibility is successfully squelched by the powers that be. Brundle-Fly is deprived of an escape route. The original formula, as inscribed in the bodies of Brundle and the fly, was apparently flawed. They did the best they could do, but only reached obsolescence. How does all of this apply to our present cultural condition? According to Deleuze, the point at which simulacrum began to unmask itself was reached in painting with the advent of Pop Art. In film, it was Italian neo-Realism and the French New Wave.25 Perhaps we are now reaching that point in popular culture as a whole. Advanced capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is reaching a new transnational level that necessitates a dissolution of old identities and territorialities and the unleashing of objects, images and information having far more mobility and combinatory potential than ever before.26 As always, this deterritorialization is effected only in order to make possible a reterritorialization on an even grander and more glorious land of worldwide capital reborn. But in the meantime, a breach has opened. The challenge is to assume this new world of simulation and take it one step farther, to the point of no return, to raise it to a positive simulation of the highest degree by marshaling all our powers of the false toward shattering the grid of representation once and for all. This cannot be done by whining. The work of Baudrillard is one long lament. Both linear and dialectical causality no longer function, therefore everything is indetermination. The center of meaning is empty, therefore we are satellites in lost orbit. We can no longer act like legislator-subjects or be passive like slaves, therefore we are sponges. Images are no longer anchored by representation, therefore they float weightless in hyperspace. Words are no longer univocal, therefore signifiers slip chaotically over each other. A circuit has been created between the real and the imaginary, therefore reality has imploded into the undecidable proximity of hyperreality. All of these statements make sense only if it is assumed that the only conceivable alternative to representative order is absolute indetermination, whereas indetermination as he speaks of it is in fact only the flipside of order, as necessary to it as the fake copy is to the model, and every bit as much a part of its system. Baudrillard's framework can only be the result of a nostalgia for the old reality so intense that it has difformed his vision of everything outside of it. He cannot clearly see that all the things he says have crumbled were simulacra all along: simulacra produced by analyzable procedures of simulation that were as real as real, or actually realer than real, because they carried the real back to its principle of production and in so doing prepared their own rebirth in a new regime of simulation. He cannot see becoming, of either variety. He cannot see that the simulacrum envelops a proliferating play of differences and galactic distances. What Deleuze and Guattari offer, particularly in A Thousand Plateaus, is a logic capable of grasping Baudrillard's failing world of representation as an effective illusion the demise of which opens a glimmer of possibility. Against cynicism, a thin but fabulous hope--of ourselves becoming realer than real in a monstrous contagion of our own making.
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then the sun disintegrates between a wall of clouds |
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02-09-2010, 07:45 PM
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#55 | |
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Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: A Few Acres of Snow
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Quote:
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02-09-2010, 07:49 PM
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#56 |
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Gomer, did you just cut and paste Zizek?
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02-09-2010, 07:56 PM
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#57 |
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The Cyberspace Real
Slavoj Zizek. Cyberspace Between Perversion and Trauma Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real? As to the symbolic dimension, the solution seems easy — it suffices to focus on the notion of authorship that fits the emerging domain of cyberspace narratives, that of the "procedural authorship": the author (say, of the interactive immersive environment in which we actively participate by role-playing) no longer writes detailed story-line, s/he merely provides the basic set of rules (the coordinates of the fictional universe in which we immerse ourselves, the limited set of actions we are allowed to accomplish within this virtual space, etc.), which serves as the basis for the interactor's active engagement (intervention, improvisation). This notion of "procedural authorship" demonstrates the need for a kind of equivalent to the Lacanian "big Other": in order for the interactor to become engaged in cyberspace, s/he has to operate within a minimal set of externally imposed accepted symbolic rules/coordinates. Without these rules, the subject/interactor would effectively become immersed in a psychotic experience of an universe in which "we do whatever we want" and are, paradoxically, for that very reason deprived of our freedom, caught in a demoniac compulsion. It is thus crucial to establish the rules that engage us, that led us in our immersion into the cyberspace, while allowing us to maintain the distance towards the enacted universe. The point is not simply to maintain "the right measure" between the two extremes (total psychotic immersion versus non-engaged external distance towards the artificial universe of the cyber-fiction): distance is rather a positive condition of immersion. If we are to surrender to the enticements of the virtual environment, we have to "mark the border," to rely on a set of marks which clearly designate that we are dealing with a fiction, in the same way in which, in order to let ourselves go and enjoy a violent war movie, we somehow have to know that what we are seeing is a staged fiction, not real-life killing (imagine our horrible surprise if, while watching a war scene, we would suddenly see that we are watching a snuff, that the actor engaged in face-to-face combat is effectively cutting the throat of his "enemy"…). Against the theorists who fear that cyberspace involves the regression to a kind of psychotic incestuous immersion, one should thus discern in today's often clumsy and ambiguous improvisations about "cyberspace rules" precisely the effort to establish clearly the contours of a new space of symbolic fictions in which we fully participate in the mode disavowal, i.e. being aware that "this is not real life." However, if this is the Symbolic, where is the Real? Is cyberspace, especially virtual reality, not the realm of perversion at its puresy? Reduced to its elementary skeleton, perversion can be seen as a defense against the Real of death and sexuality, against the threat of mortality as well as the contingent imposition of sexual difference: what the perverse scenario enacts is a "disavowal of castration" — a universe in which, as in cartoons, a human being can survive any catastrophe; in which adult sexuality is reduced to a childish game; in which one is not forced to die or to choose one of the two sexes. As such, the pervert's universe is the universe of pure symbolic order, of the signifier's game running its course, unencumbered by the Real of human finitude. So, again, does not our experience of cyberspace perfectly fit this perverse universe? Isn't cyberspace also a universe without closure, unencumbered by the inertia of the Real, constrained only by its self-imposed rules? In this comic universe, as in a perverse ritual, same gestures and scenes are endlessly repeated, without any final closure, i.e. in this universe, the refusal of a closure, far from signalling the undermining of ideology, rather enacts a proto-ideological denial: "The refusal of closure is always, at some level, a refusal to face mortality. Our fixation on electronic games and stories is in part an enactment of this denial of death. They offer us the chance to erase memory, to startover, to replay an event and try for a different resolution. In this respect, electronic media have the advantage of enacting a deeply comic vision of life, a vision of retrievable mistakes and open options." The final alternative with which cyberspace confronts us is thus: are we necessarily immersed in cyberspace in the mode of the imbecilic superego compulsion-to-repeat, in the mode of the immersion into the "undead" perverse universe of cartoons in which there is no death, in which the game goes on indefinitely, or is it possible to practice a different modality of relating to cyberspace in which this imbecilic immersion is perturbed by the "tragic" dimension of the real/impossible? There are two standard uses of cyberspace narrative: the linear, single-path maze adventure and the "postmodern" hypertext undetermined form of rhizome fiction. The single-path maze adventure moves the interactor towards a single solution within the structure of a win-lose contest (overcoming the enemy, finding the way out…). So, with all possible complications and detours, the overall path is clearly predetermined: all roads lead to one final Goal. In contrast to it, the hypertext rhizome does not privilege any order of reading or interpretation: there is no ultimate overview or "cognitive mapping," no possibility to unify the dispersed fragments in acoherent encompassing narrative framework, one is irreducibly enticed in conflicting directions — we, the interactors, just have to accept that we are lost in the inconsistent complexity of multiple referrals and connections… The paradox is that this ultimate helpless confusion, this lack of final orientation, far from causing an unbearable anxiety, is oddly reassuring: the very lack of the final point of closure serves as a kind of denial which protects us from confronting the trauma of our finitude, of the fact that there our story has to end at some point — there is no ultimate irreversible point, since, in this multiple universe, there are always other paths to explore, alternate realities into which one can take refuge when one seems to reach a deadlock. — So how are we to escape this false alternative? Janet Murray refers to the story structure of the "violence-hub", similar to the famous Rashomon predicament: an account of some violent or otherwise traumatic incident (a Sunday trip fatality, a suicide, a rape…) is placed at the center of a web of narratives-files that explore it from multiple points of view (perpetrator, victim, witness, survivor, investigator…): "The proliferation of interconnected files is an attempt to answer the perennial and ultimately unanswerable question of why this incident happened. /…/ These violence-hub stories do not have a single solution like the adventure maze or a refusal of solution like the postmodern stories; instead, they combine a clear sense of story structure with a multiplicity of meaningful plots. The navigation of the labyrinth is like pacing the floor; a physical manifestation of the effort to come to terms with the trauma, it represents the mind's repeated efforts to keep returning to a shocking event in an effort to absorb it and, finally, get past it." It is easy to perceive the crucial difference between this "retracing of the situation from different perspectives" and the rhizomatic hypertext: the endlessly repeated reenactment is referred to the trauma of some impossible Real which forever resists its symbolization — all these different narrativizations are ultimately just so many failures to cope with this trauma, with the contingent abyssal occurrence of some catastrophic Real like suicide apropos of which no "why" can ever serve as its sufficient explanation. — In a later closer elaboration, Murray even proposes two different versions of presentifying a traumatic suicidal occurrence, apart from such a texture of different perspectives. The first is to transpose us into the labyrinth of the subject's mind just prior to his suicide; the structure is here hypertextual and interactive, we are free to choose different options, to pursue the subject's ruminations in a multitude of directions — but whichever direction or link we choose, we sooner or later end up with the blank screen of the suicide. So, in a way, our very freedom to pursue different venues imitates the tragic self-closure of the subject's mind: no matter how desperately we look for a solution, we are compelled to acknowledge that there is no way out, that the final outcome will always be the same. The second version is the opposite one: we, the interactors, are put in the situation of a kind of "lesser god," having at our disposal a limited power of intervention into the life-story of the subject doomed to kill himself — say, we can "rewrite" the subject's past so that his girlfriend would not have left him, or that he would not have failed the crucial exam; yet whatever we do, the outcome is the same, so even God himself cannot change Destiny… (We find a version of this same closure in a series of alternative history sci-fi stories, in which the hero intervenes in the past in order to prevent some catastrophic event to occur, yet the unexpected result of his intervention is an even worse catastrrophy, like Stephen Fry's Making History, in which a scientist intervenes in the past making Hitler's father impotent just prior to Hitler's conception, so that Hitler is not born — as one can expect, the result of this intervention is that another German officer of aristocratic origins takes over the role of Hitler, develops the atomic bomb in time and wins the World War II.) The futur anterieur in the History of Art In a closer historical analysis, it is crucial not to conceive this narrative procedure of the multiple-perspective encircling of an impossible Real as a direct result of the cyberspace technology: technology and ideology are inextricably intertwined, ideology is inscribed already in the very technological features of cyberspace. More precisely, what we are dealing with here is yet another example of the well-known phenomenon of the old artistic forms pushing against their own boundaries and using procedures which, at least from our retroactive view, seem to point towards a new technology that will be able to serve as a more "natural" and appropriate "objective correlative" to the life-experience the old forms endeavoured to render by means of their "excessive" experimentations. A whole series of narrative procedures in the l9th century novels announce not only the standard narrative cinema (the intricate use of "flashback" in Emily Bronte or of "cross-cutting" and "close-ups" in Dickens), but sometimes even the modernist cinema (the use of "off-space" in Madame Bovary) — as if a new perception of life was already here, but was still struggling to find its proper means of articulation, until it finally found it in cinema. What we have here is thus the historicity of a kind of futur anterieur: it is only when cinema was here and developed its standard procedures that we can really grasp the narrative logic of Dickens's great novels or of Madame Bovary. And is it not that today, we are approaching a homologous threshold: a new "life experience" is in the air, a perception of life that explodes the form of the linear centered narrative and renders life as a multiform flow — even and up to the domain of "hard" sciences (quantum physics and its Multiple Reality interpretation, or the utter contingency that provided the spin to the actual evolution of the life on Earth — as Stephen Jay Gould demonstrated in his Wonderful Life, the fossils of Burgess Shale bear witness to how evolution may have taken a wholly different turn) we seem to be haunted by the chanciness of life and the alternate versions of reality. Either life is experienced as a series of multiple parallel destinies that interact and are crucially affected by meaningless contingent encounters, the points at which one series intersects with and intervenes into another (see Altman's Shortcuts), or different versions/outcomes of the same plot are repeatedly enacted (the "parallel universes" or "alternative possible worlds" scenarios — see Kieslowski's Chance, Veronique and Red; even "serious" historians themselves recently produced a volume Virtual History, the reading of the crucial Modeern Age century events, from Cromwell's victory over Stuarts and American independence war to the disintegration of Communism, as hinging on unpredictable and sometimes even improbable chances). This perception of our reality as one of the possible — often even not the most probable — outcomes of an "open" situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply cancelled out but continue to haunt our "true" reality as a spectre of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant "linear" narrative forms of our literature and cinema — they seem to call for a new artistic medium in which they would not be an eccentric excess, but its "proper" mode of functioning. One can argue that the cyberspace hypertext is this new medium in which this life experience will find its "natural," more appropriate objective correlative, so that, again, it is only with the advent of cyberspace hypertext that we can effectively grasp what Altman and Kieslowski were effectively aiming at. Are not the ultimate example of this kind of futur anterieur Brecht's (in)famous "learning plays," especially his The Measure Taken, often dismissed as the justification of Stalinist purges. Although "learning plays" are usually conceived as an intermediary phenomenon, the passage between Brecht's early carnavalesque plays critical of bourgeois society and his late "mature" epic theatre, it is crucial to recall that, just before his death, when asked about what part of his works effectively augurs the "drama of the future," Brecht instantly answered "The Measure Taken." As Brecht emphasized again and again, The Measure Taken is ideally to be performed without the observing public, just with the actors repeatedly playing all the roles and thus "learning" the different subject-positions — do we not have here the anticipation of the cyberspace "immersive participation," in which actors engage in the "educational" collective role-playing. What Brecht was aiming at is the immersive participation which, nonetheless, avoids the trap of emotional identification: we immerse ourselves at the level of "meaningless," "mechanical" level of what, in Foucauldian terms, one is tempted to call "revolutionary disciplinary micro-practices," while at the same time critically observing our behavior. Does this not point also to a possible "educational" use of participatory cyberspace role-playing games in which, by way of repeatedly enacting different versions/outcomes of a same basic predicament, one can become aware of the ideological presuppositions and surmises that unknowingly guide our daily behavior? Do Brecht's three versions of his first great "learning play," Der Jasager, effectively not present us with such hypertext / alternate reality experience: in the first version, the boy "freely accept the necessary," subjecting himself to the old custom of being thrown into the valley; in the second version, the boy refuses to die, rationally demonstrating the futility of the old custom; in the third version, the boy accepts his death, but on rational grounds, not out of the respect for mere tradition. So when Brecht emphasizes that, by participating in the situation staged by his "learning plays," actors/agents themselves have to change, progressing towards a different subjective stance, he effectively points towards what Murray adequately calls "enactment as a transformational experience." In other words, apropos of Brecht's "learning plays," one should ask a naive straightforward question: what, effectively, are we, spectators, supposed to learn from them? Not some corps of positive knowledge (in this case, instead of trying to discern the Marxist idea wrapped in the "dramatic" scenery, it would certainly be better to read directly the philosophical work itself…), but a certain subjective attitude, that of "saying YES to the inevitable," i.e. the readiness to self-obliteration — in a way, one learns precisely the virtue of accepting the Decision, the Rule, without knowing why… In his much underrated The Lost Highway, David Lynch transposes the vertical into the horizontal: social reality (the everyday aseptic/impotent modern couple) and its "repressed" fantasmatic supplement (the noir universe of forbidden masochistic passions and Oedipal triangles) are directly posited one next to the other, as two alternate universes. This co-existence and mutual envelopment of different universes led some New Age tilted reviewers to claim that The Lost Highway moves at a more fundamental psychic level than that of unconscious fantasizing of one subject: at a level, closer to the mind of "primitive" civilizations, of reincarnation, of double identities, of being reborn as a different person, etc. Against this "multiple reality" talk, one should insist on the fact that the fantasmatic support of reality is in itself necessarily multiple and inconsistent. And this is what Lynch does in The Lost Highway: he "traverses" our late-capitalist fantasmatic universe not by way of direct social criticism (depicting the grim social reality which serves as its actual foundation), but by staging these fantasies openly, without the "secondary perlaboration" which usually masks their inconsistencies. That is to say, the undecidability and ambiguity of what goes on in the film's narrative (are the two women played by Patricia Arquette the same women? Is the inserted story of Fred's younger reincarnation just Fred's hallucination, imagined to provide a post-festum rationale for his murder of his wife whose true cause is Fred's hurted male pride due to his impotence, his inability to satisfy the woman?) renders the very ambiguity and inconsistency of the fantasmatic framework which underlies and sustains our experience of (social) reality. It was often claimed that Lynch throws us, the spectators, open in our face the underlying fantasies of the noir universe — yes, but he simultaneously also renders visible the INCONSISTENCY of this fantasmatic support. The two main story-lines in The Lost Highway can thus be interpreted as akin to the dream-logic in which you can both "have your cake and eat it", like in the "Tea or coffee? Yes, please!" joke: you first dream about eating it, then about having/possessing it, since dreams does not know of contradiction. The dreamer resolves a contradiction by staging two exclusive situations one after the other; in the same way, in The Lost Highway, the woman (the dark Arquette) is destroyed/killed/punished, and the same woman (the blond Arquette) eludes the male grasp and triumphantly disappears… Or, to put it in yet another way, Lynch confronts us with a universe in which different, mutually exclusive fantasies co-exist. Peter Hoeg's novel The Woman and the Ape stages sex with an animal as a fantasy of full sexual relationship, and it is crucial that this animal is as a rule male: in contrast to the cyborg-sex fantasy, in which the cyborg is as a rule a woman, i.e. in which the fantasy is that of Woman-Machine (Blade Runner), the animal is a male ape copulating with a human woman and fully satisfying her. Does this not materialize two standard vulgar notions: that of a woman who wants a strong animal partner, a "beast," not a hysterical impotent weakling, and that of a man who wants his feminine partner to be a perfectly programmed doll meeting all his wishes, not an effective living being. What Lynch does by staging inconsistent fantasies together, at the same level, is, in the terms of Hoag's novel, something akin to confronting us with the unbearable scene of the "ideal couple" underlying this novel, the scene of a male ape copulating with a female cyborg — the most efficient way to undermine the hold this fantasy exerts over us. And, perhaps, along the same lines, cyberspace, with its capacity to externalize our innermost fantasies in all their inconsistency, opens up to artistic practice a unique possiblity to stage, to "act out," the fantasmatic support of our existence, up to the fundamental "sado-masochistic" fantasy that can never be subjectivized. We are thus invited to risk the most radical experience imaginable: the encounter with the Other Scene that stages the foreclosed hard core of the subject's Being. Far from enslaving us to these fantasies and thus turning us into desubjectivized blind puppets, it enables us to treat them in a playful way and thus to adopt towards them a minimum of distance — in short, to achieve what Lacan calls la traversee du fantasme, "going-through, traversing the fantasy." Constructing the Fantasy The strategy of "traversing the fantasy" in cyberspace can even be "operationalized" in a much more precise way. Let us for a moment return to Brecht's three versions of Der Jasager: these three versions seems to exhaust all possible variations of the matrix provided by the basic situation (perhaps with the inclusion of the fourth version, in which a boy rejects his death not for rational reasons, as unnecessary, but out of pure egotistic fear — not to mention the uncanny fifth version in which the boy "irrationally" endorses his death even when the "old custom" does NOT ask him to do it…). However, already at the level of a discerning "intuitive" reading, we can feel that the three versions are not at the same level: it is as if the first version renders the underlying traumatic core (the "death-drive" situation of willingly endorsing one's radical self-erasure), and the other two versions in a way react to this trauma, "domesticating" it, displacing/translating it into more acceptable terms, so that, if we were to see just one of these two latter versions, the proper psychoanalytic reading of them would justify the claim that these two versions present a displaced/transformed variation of some more fundamental fantasmatic scenario. Along the same lines, one can easily imagine how, when we are haunted by some fantasmatic scenario, externalizing it in cyberspace enables us to acquire a minimum of distance towards it, i.e. to subject it to a manipulation which will generate other variations of the same matrix — and, once we exhaust all main narrative possibilities, once we are confronted with the closed matrix of all possible permutations of the basic matrix underlying the explicit scenario we started with, we are bound to generate also the underlying "fundamental fantasy" in its undistorted, "non-sublimated," embarrassingly outright form, i.e. not yet displaced, obfuscated by "secondary perlaborations": "The experience of the underlying fantasy coming to the surface is not merely an exhaustion of narrative possibilities; it is more like the solution to a constructivist puzzle. /…/ When every variation of the situation has been played out, as in the final season of a long-running series, the underlying fantasy comes to the surface. /…/ Robbed of the elaboration of sublimation, the fantasy is too bald and unrealistic, like the child carrying the mother up to bed. The suppressed fantasy has a tremendous emotional charge, but once its energy has saturated the story pattern, it loses its tension." Is this "losing the tension" of the fundamental fantasy not another way to say that the subject traversed this fantasy? Of course, as Freud emphasized apropos of the fundamental fantasy "My father is beating me," underlying the explicit scene "A child is being beaten" that haunts the subject, this fundamental fantasy is a pure retroactive construction, since it was never present to the consciousness and then repressed: although it plays a proto-transcendental role, providing the ultimate coordinates of the subject's experience of reality, the subject is never able to fully assume/subjectivize in the first person singular — precisely as such, it can be generated by the procedure of "mechanical" variation on the explicit fantasies that haunt and fascinate the subject. To evoke Freud's other standard example, endeavouring to display how pathological male jealousy involves an unacknowledged homosexual desire for the male partner with whom I think my wife is cheating me: we arrive at the underlying statement "I LOVE him" by manipulating/permutating the explicit statement of my obsession "I HATE him (because I love my wife whom he seduced)." — We can see, now, how the purely virtual, non-actual, universe of cyberspace can "touch the Real": the Real we are talking about is not the "raw" pre-symbolic real of "nature in itself," but the spectral hard core of "psychic reality" itself. When Lacan equates the Real with what Freud calls "psychic reality," this "psychic reality" is not simply the inner psychic life of dreams, wishes, etc., as opposed to the perceived external reality, but the hard core of the primordial "passionate attachments," which are real in the precise sense of resisting the movement of symbolization and/or dialectical mediation: "/…/ the expression 'psychical reality' itself is not simply synonymous with 'internal world,' 'psychological domain,' etc. If taken in the most basic sense that it has for Freud, this expression denotes a nucleus within that domain which is heterogeneous and resistant and which is alone in being truly 'real' as compared with the majority of psychical phenomena." The "real" upon which cyberspace encroaches is thus the disavowed fantasmatic "passionate attachment," the traumatic scene which not only never took place in "real life," but was never even consciously fantasized — and is not the digital universe of cyberspace the ideal medium in which to construct such pure semblances which, although they are nothing "in themselves," pure presuppositions, provide the coordinates of our entire experience? It may appear that the impossible Real is to be opposed to the virtual domain of symbolic fictions: is the Real not the traumatic kernel of the Same against whose threat we seek refuge in the multitude of virtual symbolic universes? However, our ultimate lesson is that the Real is simultaneously the exact opposite of such a non-virtual hard core: a purely virtual entity, an entity which has no positive ontological consistency — its contours can only be discerned as the absent cause of the distortions/displacements of the symbolic space. And it is only in this way, through touching the kernel of the Real, that cyberspace can be used to counteract what one is tempted to call the ideological practice of disidentification. That is to say, one should turn around the standard notion of ideology as providing the firm identification to its subjects, constraining them to their "social roles": what if, at a different — but no less irrevocable and structurally necessary — level, ideology is effective precisely by way of constructing a space of false disidentification, of false distance towards the actual coordinates of the subjects's social existence? Is this logic of disidentification not discernible from the most elementary case of "I am not only an American (husband, worker, democrat, gay…), but, beneath all these roles and masks, a human being, a complex unique personality" (where the very distance towards the symbolic feature that determines my social place guarantees the efficiency of this determination), up to the more complex case of cyberspace playing with one's multiple identities? The mystification operative in the perverse "just gaming" of cyberspace is thus double: not only are the games we are playing in it more serious than we tend to assume (is it not that, in the guise of a fiction, of "it's just a game," a subject can articulate and stage — sadistic, "perverse," etc. — features of his symbolic identity that he would never be able to admit in his "real" intersubjective contacts?), but the opposite also holds, i.e. the much celebrated playing with multiple, shifting personas (freely constructed identities) tends to obfuscate (and thus falsely liberate us from) the constraints of social space in which our existence is caught. |
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02-09-2010, 07:57 PM
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#58 |
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Notes
1. See Janet H.Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, The MIT Press: Cambridge (Ma) 1997, p. 278. 2. As to the concept of perversion, see Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, New York: Zone Books 1991. 3. Murray, op.cit., p.175. 4. Op.cit., p. 135-6. 5. See Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life, New York: Norton 1989. 6. See Virtual History, edited by Niall Ferguson, London: MacMillan 1997. 7. See Bertolt Brecht, "The Measure Taken," in The Jewish Wife and Other Short Plays, New York: Grove Press 1965. For a detailed reading of The Measure Taken, see Chapter 5 of Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, New York: Routledge 1993. 8. Murray, op.cit., p. 169-170. 9. See Sigmund Freud, "A child is being beaten," in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, New York: Touchstone 1997, p. 97-122. 10. See Sigmund Freud, "Psychoanalytical Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia," in Three Case Histories, New York: Touchstone 1996, p. 139-141. 11. As to this term, see Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997. 12. J.Laplanche / J.B.Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac Books 1988, p. 315. 13. I rely here on Peter Pfaller, "Der Ernst der Arbeit ist vom Spiel gelernt," in Work & Culture, Klagenfurt: Ritter Verlag 1998, p. 29-36 |
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02-09-2010, 07:57 PM
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#59 |
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Excellence of Execution
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fightclub
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I'm the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be. |
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02-09-2010, 08:02 PM
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#60 |
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no it was from this, 1987
http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_...rks/realer.htm this is my favorite webpage in the earth web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality
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then the sun disintegrates between a wall of clouds |
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02-09-2010, 08:02 PM
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#61 | |
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Quote:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svAs-...eature=related |
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02-09-2010, 08:03 PM
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#62 |
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i think this is pretty funny formt hat
" Ten years after Hans Moravec first published the simulation argument (and three years after its update in Moravec's second full pop science book),[1] the philosopher Nick Bostrom investigated the possibility that we may be living in a simulation.[2] A simplified version of his argument proceeds as such: i. It is possible that an advanced civilization could create a computer simulation which contains individuals with artificial intelligence (AI). ii. Such a civilization would likely run many, billions for example, of these simulations (just for fun, for research or any other permutation of possible reasons.) iii. A simulated individual inside the simulation wouldn’t necessarily know that it is inside a simulation — it is just going about its daily business in what it considers to be the "real world." Then the ultimate question is — if one accepts that the above premises are at least possible— which of the following is more likely? a. We are the one civilization which develops AI simulations and happens not to be in one itself? b. We are one of the many (billions) of simulations that has run? (Remember point iii.) In greater detail, his argument attempts to prove the trichotomy, either that: 1. intelligent races will never reach a level of technology where they can run simulations of reality so detailed they can be mistaken for reality (assuming that this is possible in principle); or 2. races who do reach such a sophisticated level do not tend to run such simulations; or 3. we are almost certainly living in such a simulation. "
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then the sun disintegrates between a wall of clouds |
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02-09-2010, 09:27 PM
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#63 |
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Upstanding Fucking Media Player
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RsU5v6DZqE |
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02-10-2010, 05:54 AM
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#64 | |
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Quote:
Key post marxist features; Gave up on class struggle as the defining societal fulcrum Gave up on the idea of commodities gaining value through use and exchange value (now purely symbolic) No revoltuion for Baudrillard, very pessimistic These three features make him related to Marx, but against him.
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You're a proper chav Nasty and you're not full white either, you look like the kind of kids that terrorise poor estates. -Synesthesia. |
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02-10-2010, 06:51 AM
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#65 |
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I suppose it's a lot like calling Ronald Dworkin a legal positivist. Although he holds some beliefs in common with positivists, his entire raison d'etre was to debate HLA Hart who was definitively a positivist. Dworkin certainly was not a natural law theorist. I draw this comparison because calling Baudrillard a Marxist is a lot like calling Dworkin a legal positivist. Although they have elements in common, it is factually incorrect. However, Dworkin, although not a positivist, is certainly not a natural law theorist. Baudrillard, in the same regard, is certainly not a capitalist and his theoretical framework comes from Marx.
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02-10-2010, 07:06 AM
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#66 |
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pretty much bro
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You're a proper chav Nasty and you're not full white either, you look like the kind of kids that terrorise poor estates. -Synesthesia. |
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02-10-2010, 10:08 AM
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#67 |
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Fuck you !
Proudhon was right : “Jews; make laws against this race, which poisons everything, by mingling into in all affairs without seeking unity with any people. Demand their expulsion from France, except those married to Frenchman, abolish synagogues, reject them at any workplace, eventually demanding the abolishment of this cult. It is not by accident that the Christians considered them to be godless. The Jew is the enemy of the human race. One must send this race back to Asia or exterminate it. By fire or fusion or by expulsion, the Jew must disappear. What the people of the middle ages hated by instinct, I hate upon reflexion and irrecoverably. The hatred of the Jew, as that of the English, must be an article of our political faith.” |
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02-10-2010, 10:56 AM
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#68 |
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The Pious Son of Demons
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Nasty, that this thread has risen above the level of Klein's 3rd grade theatrics, have you finished Das Kapital? If so, why? Also, if so, have you started any of your birthday present books? If not, why?
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Mankind will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. |
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02-10-2010, 11:00 AM
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#69 |
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I've had alot on my mind recently. Gonna start reading again soon.
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You're a proper chav Nasty and you're not full white either, you look like the kind of kids that terrorise poor estates. -Synesthesia. |
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02-10-2010, 12:06 PM
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#70 |
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Add these to the list of things you'll never have time to read:
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman 'The Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions' by Max Weber Social Systems by Niklas Luhmann |
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